HIST-H 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Susie Taylor, Hiram Rhodes Revels, Charleston, South Carolina
End of Reconstruction
Southern Whites are angry over Radical Republican rule in South, the effort to enforce
equal rights and racial equality, and the rising political power of blacks. Thus, the South
will try to restore white supremacy through violence and end Radical Republican
influence.
Freedom as a New Experience
A. Some blacks now elected to political office (2 to US senate)
B. Southern Blacks form their own churches now
C. Officially allowed to marry; slave marriages had no legal standing before Civil
War
D. Started to travel; free movement had been restricted
E. Education: most slaves could not read or write; Freedmen’s Bureau schools
became widespread
Newly Freed People
● Susie King Taylor
○ Openly teaching freed slaves
First Blacks to Congress
● Hiram Revels
○ 1st black ever to Senate (elected from Mississippi)
● During Reconstruction (1865-1877): total of 2 to senate and 21 more to House
First Memorial Day
● Generally thought to be in Charleston, SC
● City in ruins after war/ most whites fled
● Freed blacks still in city marched on May 1, 1865 at site of a local race course
that had been used as a prison for union soldiers...honored white troops who
died there
● Thousands marched--procession led by 3000 black children carrying roses and
singing “John Brown’s Body”
Sickness and Disease
● Four million slaves now free but many suffer illness (especially smallpox and
cholera)
○ Cholera--an infectious disease that leads to diarrhea, dehydration and
then death
● Many ex slaves had nowhere to live and ended up in “Contraband Camps” near
union army bases
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